Amy Lowell's series of poems from 1919including
"Decade," "Opal," "Madonna of the Evening Flowers," and
"Venus Transiens"--are among the most elegantly passionate love poems in modern
American poetry. A reevaluation of her career might begin with a love poem like "The
Weather-Cock Points South" (1919), whose reordering of the natural world in layers
around a pursuit of intimacy we can now see as heralding the deep image poetry of the
1960s.

As we can tell from its first stanza, "The Weather-Cock Points South" is
remarkable for the way it fuses an eroticized spirituality with explicit physical
references.

I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

The leaves are put aside at once by a disrobing and by a probing embrace. The poem
involves a pursuit of psychic intimacy--a drive to know and celebrate another's
inwardness--and an explicit vaginal caress. The flower with its petals and bud is thus
both body and spirit, but there is no severing the two. And the woman she describes seems
both the object of her gaze and the flower of her own unfolding affection. The flower is
both the center of the lover's body and the center of the self, for it becomes the site
from which the subject seems to speak. It is also the center of the gardens coalescing in
the poem and, implicitly, of nature as a whole. Her unwavering concentration on it gives
it the transience of wax and the permanence of stone--"of jade, of unstreaked agate;
/ Flower with surfaces of ice."

"The stars crowd through the lilac leaves / To look at you," Lowell writes,
so it is clear she would have no patience with a criminalized notion of the gaze. There
seems little reason, indeed, to impose a contemporary prudishness either on her or on
other modern poets. An objectifying took or verbal representation does not preclude a
variety of other perspectives; indeed it is both a form of celebratory play and a form of
concentration that can be empathic.

From "The Fate of Gender in Modern American Poetry." In Marketing
Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and
Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Copyright 1996 by the
University of Michigan.

Melissa Bradshaw

As recent feminist and lesbian rereadings of Lowells work bring her love lyrics
to the forefront, this poem is often cited as an example of her "overtly and frankly
erotic lyrics" (Heymann 250). Discussion of the lyrics eroticism seldom delves
any deeper than this, however. Is the erotic symbolism so obvious that we can take it for
granted, never actually articulating or explaining just what we think we are seeing in
this poem? Mary E. Galvin comes closest when she notes that here we have "a
flower-bud . . . so erotically drawn that it can easily be seen to replicate the female
genitals" (29). But as Bennetts essay makes clear, Lowells imagery is
neither radical, nor shocking: in the nineteenth century, flower imagery, or the
"Language of Flowers" constituted a "highly nuanced discourse of female
erotic desire," and was a common, even ubiquitous, signifying system "through
which womans body and . . . womens genitals have been represented and
inscribed" (242). What I believe makes Lowells poem unique, and what
Galvins reading ignores, is the poems sexual aggressiveness, as the speaker
tells the beloved, in an active, dominating narrative voice "I put your leaves
aside," "I parted you." As in "Aubade," the
poem may very well encode female genitals through flower imagery, but it as well
discursively replicates the sexual act of opening up a womans
genitalsan act that involves several openings and unfoldings: legs, outer-labia
("the stiff, broad outer leaves") and inner-labia, ("the smaller ones, . .
. veined with purple"); an act that, presented as a discrete, sexual performance, not
necessarily foreplay, might be described as lesbian. This is not to say that the sexual
gesture is solely and specifically lesbian, but neither is it explicitly heterosexual: the
beloved is "not a space to be entered but . . . a presence to be uncovered and
adored" (Bennett 244).

Granted, this relentlessly sexualized reading of the poem risks defining and reifying
the beloved. Certainly it goes against the more subtle aesthetic outlined in a letter
Lowell wrote to an aspiring poet where she explained that "in true Imagistic poetry
the method more often than not points like a weather-cock to the emotion it both conceals
and reveals," a poetics of gesturing subtly towards a subtext ( letter to Donald B.
Clark 8/23/18). I understand why it may not be a good idea to read the poem so literally,
but what are the costs of not extending Lowells sexual metaphor this far? Of
pausing for a moment, blushing, thinking about this reading, and then resisting it?
Judith Halberstam describes this as symptomatic of queer theorys double bindto
make visible without universalizing, to focus on specifics without erasing difference. In
the effort not to essentialize or exclude "we have become accustomed to talking sex
and indeed thinking sex in increasingly abstract and increasingly symbolic ways" (4).
According to Halberstam,

sex, as in sexual acts and practices, and particularly lesbian sex, seems eclipsed once
more by discursive practice. Specifying sexual acts and their histories allows us to break
with identity discourses which have a tendency to render some minority sexual practices
completely unintelligible and to conflate still others with criminality. (4)

The ways in which "The Weather-Cock Points South" has been read (or rather,
has not been read) bring this difficulty into focus. But Lowells dazzle camouflage
might, at the same time, offer a possible strategy for circumventing the pathologization
and/or silencing of which Halberstam warns. When I read the poem, as a woman who
identifies as a lesbian, the imagery seems obvious. But even so, in hearing a
narrative voice which, to my mind, clearly employs flower imagery as a way of representing
opening up and gazing at a womans genitalsan act of sexual aggressiveness I do
not expect to find in Lowell, whose few critics approach her with formulaic biases and
therefore who Ive been taught to read as an old maid, a frustrated spinstermy
initial response is disbelief: that cant possibly be what shes doing.
And this incredulity, which makes me hesitate over the poem, is critical: Lowells
imagery is not, cannot be, obvious, the poems power is in its refusal of a
stable, codifiable representation of sexuality. This plasticity authorizes multiple
responses, from C. David Heymans contention that her erotic poetry is "too
graphic to be taken at face value" (251), to Glenn Ruihley and Richard
Benvenutos reassurances that the lyrics chronicle a purely platonic love, to Clement
Woods homophobic declaration that Pictures of the Floating Worlds
lyrics demonstrate "the reverse of an ignorance of love-practices" (159), to
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars confident assumption that they reflect Lowells
lesbianism. Whether it delights or repulses, titillates or confuses, "The
Weather-Cock" resists what Scott Long terms "the straight interpretation"
which "too often accepts . . . only representations it can take on the level of
simple desire . . . . a curious critical response in that it dreams of an ideal work to
which it can submit in uncritical and complete self-cancellation" (88).

Late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical and psychological probings into the
causes and origins of female desire focused on the clitoris as both the "source"
of female sexual pleasure, and, inevitably, the site of failures of normative female
sexuality. A desire for sexual activity not leading to coition, or as Freud put it,
"the normal sexual aim" (21)such as masturbation and/or
inversionwere read as symptoms of a pathological hypersexuality and linked to an
over-active clitoris. Even as it celebrates a non-phallic, non-coital, and, it would
appear at first glance, clitoral sexuality, "The Weather-Cock Points South"
adroitly skirts the issue. For the reader who would follow the narrators gaze as she
uncovers the beloved, peer at her nudity, discover the "truth" hidden beneath
her layers, this poem frustrates: at the heart of these many partings is not a finite,
knowable, quantifiable thing, but a slick, shining surface"glazed inner
leaves," a "flower with surfaces of ice." As in "Madonna of the
Evening Flowers," a reflective surface (created by the wetness of sexual arousal?)
deflects the onlookers gaze, turning it back on itself, resisting legibility and
classification. Further, the poems languorous peeling back of layers foregrounds the
fact that flowers exist in multiplicity. That is, a flower consists of petals,
sepals, filaments, anthers, and so on. There is no ultimate originary point to the flower.
In what might be construed as a nod towards Freud, Lowell (un)writes female pleasure
through negation:

The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.

This stanza complicates the flower as cliched symbol of feminine beauty and revitalizes
a tired metaphor. "A littleness that is paradoxically great," the bud is more
than the calyx, the immediately visible outer whorl of petals, what we see and
recognize as the flower. (Bennett 247). Lowells phrasing deflects attention away
from, even as it valorizes, the overscrutinized clitoris. Declaring that "there isnothing to equal a white bud," the speaker posits the allegedly not
present as infinitely, even excessively, present in its "absence," or rather its
refusal to confirm expectations, to satisfy curiosity. "Burnished by moonlight,"
(an evocative, sexy verb in this context) the shining surface of the "white
flower" becomes even shinier as it is acted on, whether by the narrator/lover, who
rubs against it sexually, or by the observer who would rub it in order to wipe away
opacity and gain a clearer view. It becomes a mirror of the lookers desire rather
than a decipherable text.

Galvin notes the paradoxical imagery of the last line, where the flower is "thrust
upon" by a "softly-swinging wind": "lest the reader think this is the
familiar heterosexual thrust, . . . Lowell immediately contrasts the potential
violence of this verb with the sonorant phrase "by a softly-swinging wind" (31).
She explains that this phrase "carries lesbian implications" because Lowell,
"by dint of authorship, associates herself with the speaker, who in turn is
associated within the poem with the wind, as agent of erotic caresses" (31). The
metaphor is even more suggestive than Gavin allows, however: if this is a perfect flower,
such as a rose or a lily, with both a pistil and a stamen at its center, then the wind
serves as agent not only of "erotic caresses," but of pollination as well. The
poem, then, imagines a stigmatized (because non-reproductive) sexuality, as in fact,
reproductive and creative, although not as understood within a heterosexual context.

Originally published in Vanity Fair in June of 1919 as "The Weather-Vane
Points South," the poem appeared later that year in Pictures of the Floating World
under its new title, "The Weather-Cock Points South." This change subtly alters
the poems intensity. Weather-cocks traditionally top steeples on Christian churches,
as reminders of Christs prophecy that the apostle Peter would betray him three times
before the cock crows. In renaming the poem, Lowell resignifies the space and the action
of the poem: if weather-cocks preside over holy, sanctified spaces, then the space of this
love-making, Lowell seems to imply, is holy, this act of love-making sanctified.

It is clear that the aesthetics and techniques of imagism provided a powerful vehicle
for Amy Lowell's erotic vision. Like Pound, H.D., and others, Lowell was strongly
influenced by oriental poetry. She, too, did translations (from the Japanese), and her
lyrical style is modeled, in part, on the cool but detailed "objectism" of the
haiku and similar forms. This is obvious in the first two sections of Pictures of the
Floating World, which are subtitled "Lacquer Prints" and
"Chinoiseries." While many of these poems are somewhat pretty and delicate in
their construction, for the most part they are fairly shallow, dealing merely with the
surface image, as in "Circumstance":

Upon the maple leaves
The dew shines red,
But on the lotus blossom
It has the pale transparence of tears.

All this changes, however, in the subsequent sections, particularly in the section of
lyrical love poems addressed to or about Ada Dwyer Russell, subtitled "Planes of
Personality: Two Speak Together." Here, the detached observation of surface detail
signals an undercurrent of passionate emotion and eroticism, disguised yet explicitly
drawn in the natural images Lowell creates. A good example is "The Weather-Cock
Points South" in which the "word-painting" of a flower-bud is so erotically
drawn that it can easily be seen to represent the female genitals, so that this
descriptive exploration of the flower is transformed into a celebration of lesbian
sexuality:

I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying softly in the evening wind.

Here is evidence of how the discipline of imagism taught Lowell to focus only on
relevant detail and to use a nondiscursive language, one that relies on the sensory
qualities of the experience. Through the precision of her word choice, Lowell achieves a
vividness of expression that appeals to several senses: sight (broad, smaller, purple,
etc.), touch (stiff, pleasant, glazed), and also an implication of sound (evening wind)
and scent (white flower). Lowell is relying not only on the detail of image to convey a
sensual experience, but also on the textured patterning of sound to suggest a
deliberateness, but with delicacy, a tender caution. The alliteration and assonance,
featuring soft consonants and short vowels (such as s, z, p, w, n and flat a
of part, small, pleasant)add to this gentle tone. The repeated line
"One by one" slows the pace considerably, as do the short but end-stopped lines.
The repetition of "leaves" at or near the end of almost every other line
indicates that while there is movement and action taking place here, it is slow and
explorative, almost worshipful in tone.

The second stanza takes on a more overtly reverential tone:

White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you.
The low moon brightens you with silver.

Here, the litany of attributes serves as a kind of invocation, a reverential,
ritualistic form of address, leading to the awe-stricken question, "Where in all the
garden is there such a flower?" This question is an assertion of the
"flower's" unchallenged beauty. In the last three lines, the "flower"
gains a majesty and splendor that cause the stars and moon to gaze and even bow ("low
moon") with wonder.

In the last stanza, Lowell gives the most definitive clue that this white flower may
represent something else altogether by the assertion in the first line:

This bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no color, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.

The color white used to describe the flower also becomes associated with the moon here,
carried over from the word "silver" at the end of the previous stanza. This
association is developed further as the "white bud/ Of no color, and of all," is
"Burnished by moonlight."

Many feminist critics today, learning to "read" women's poetry as encoded
celebrations and explorations of female sexuality in non-patriarchal terms, have pointed
out that some images predominate for this purpose: in addition to flowers, the moon and
its cycles are used to signify female sexuality. While these images are rich with erotic
possibilities, I don't quite believe that Lowell was interested in encoding the sexual
message too deeply. If anything, it seems Lowell wants to be sure that the reader gets the
sexual connotations of the poem by using the already heavily connotated words "Thrust
upon" at the beginning of the last line. Lest the reader think this is the familiar
heterosexual "thrust," however, Lowell immediately contrasts the potential
violence of this verb with the sonorant phrase "by a softly-swinging wind." This
final phrase carries lesbian implications not only in its reversal of expectations, but
also in that it echoes back to the first stanza, where the wind is the only agent of
motion besides the speaker, "I." Thus, Amy Lowell, who often read her poetry in
person, by dint of authorship, associates herself with the speaker, who in turn is
associated within the poem with the wind, as agent of erotic caresses.

Like Dickinson's, much of Lowell's work draws on nature, and even more specifically, on
garden imagery. On the surface, this approach can seem to fit safely within the confines
of the cultural expectations of "female versifiers," and much of Lowell's
poetry, like Dickinson's, can be misconstrued as pretty little nature poems.
Paradoxically, nature images are the perfect vehicle of expression for both of these
poets' visions. It is familiar and readily accessible for both poets, yet they see in it
an expression of their "deviant" beliefs and loves.

Lowell's poetics of imagism, with its preponderance of garden imagery, combined with
her love for Ada Russell, allowed her to write extremely erotic lesbian poetry. However,
because of Lowell's physical size and demeanor and the cultural invisibility of her erotic
sensibility, the power of her lesbianism as a creative force within her work in
particular, and within modernism in general, has been largely disregarded. Being aware of
this expectation of triviality, and the overlay of heterosexist assumptions placed on
Lowell's erotic life, allows us to see how the vision of the "straight mind" can
erase the significance of this lesbian work from its place in literary history.

There is further significance to the use of nature imagery in Lowell's overtly sexual
lesbian poetics. Not unlike Dickinson's use of the hymn meter to offset her own cultural
heresies, the juxtaposition of "natural" images with "unnatural"
sexualities creates an ironic tension between these socially constructed polarities, which
forces the distinctions to give way. By bringing these "oppositional" concepts
together, not in conflict but in relation, the boundaries of this dichotomy begin to
disintegrate. Thus, by thinking with a lesbian sensibility, she throws the logic of the
heterosexist culture against itself, and creates a paradoxical legitimation for lesbian
existence: if nature evidences these "unnatural" images of sexual expression,
then the "unnatural" is perhaps more "natural" than we have been led
to believe.